Obama tries to get more aggressive on Iraq
Barack Obama has been taking increasing heat from liberal bloggers for not being more assertive in pushing for an end to the war in Iraq. Late last week, a posting that attracted particular attention on Daily Kos was headlined: "Take the damn ball, Senator Obama."
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Democratic presidential contender today offered a more specific plan, calling for troop withdrawals to start immediately and setting a goal of removing all U.S. combat forces by the end of 2008. (Also perhaps not coincidentally, he delivered his remarks in Clinton, Iowa).
The full text of Obama's speech can be read here.
How it will play with Americans is yet to be determined. But two of his rivals in the Democratic race who are trying to break into the top tier wasted little time blasting Obama's proposal as offering less than meets the eyes.
Chris Dodd, in a release that also takes shot at Hillary Clinton, expressed disappointment that Obama "didn't include a firm, enforceable deadline for redeployment."
Bill Richardson, in a release, noted that removing the "combat" troops isn't the same as fully ending the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Obama, he said, "did not tell us what he would do with the tens of thousands of non-combat troops who also are stuck in the middle of a civil war."
Richardson, as he seeks to stress at every candidate debate, wants all troops, including so-called residual forces, gone in six months or so (a scenario that another of the lagging Democratic contenders, Joe Biden, rarely hesitates to dismiss as impractical).
In seeking to gain some momentum within the antiwar community, Obama also has to overcome what many viewed as a botched opportunity when it came his turn to question Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the U.S. envoy to Iraq, at Tuesday's Senate Foreign Relations hearing.
Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times provides a pithy critique here.
-- Don Frederick
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Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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